The state Department of Higher Education chief has tossed out a newly agreed- upon formula of doling out money to public colleges and universities because school presidents were fighting about how much money each school deserved.

David Skaggs will take another year to work with the college presidents on the new funding model, created from a national study comparing Colorado schools with similar institutions across the country.

That study found Colorado down $750 million from its peers nationally. The state is 48th in the country in per capita funding of higher education.

On this, the schools agree. But how much each one is down compared to its peers — and how that money would eventually be repaid as the governor devotes more to higher education — proved too difficult a hurdle for the 13 public-school presidents over several months of grueling meetings.

“We have to have some way of dealing with the fundamental issues without wallowing in history,” said Kay Norton, president of the University of Northern Colorado.

The presidents of the state’s colleges and universities often joke amongst themselves that they are fighting for scraps.

The state has dramatically cut how much is spent on higher education. In 1972, it was 27 percent of the state’s budget. Thirty-six years later, that category is only 11.5 percent of the state’s budget.

Between 2001 and 2005, the legislature pared more than $120 million from the institutions’ bottom lines.

Since then, policy and lawmakers have scrambled to catch up within constitutionally mandated spending restrictions. Referendum C, which was approved by voters, gave temporary reprieve and devoted more money to public colleges and universities.

“It’s just a mess,” Norton said. “To pick out any one element, to say enrollment is really the issue or graduate programs are really the issue is incomplete and creates hard feelings.”

Gov. Bill Ritter proposed giving $59.5 million more to higher education this year.

A boost from last year

The earlier plan was to fund schools proportionally compared to how much they are financially down among their peer institutions.

But disagreements about how to count in-state and out- of-state tuition, among other things, led the Department of Higher Education and the schools to an impasse.

“I was hoping that we were able to proceed,” Skaggs said. “But the institutions . . . were worried.”

Instead, Skaggs is expected to introduce a 7.7 percent increase to all the schools across the state this week. This is based on what the schools got from the state’s general fund last year.

The whole fight has pitted the University of Colorado against everybody else, primarily because CU is seeking a separate line item for its medical school — even though the school gets $8 million each year from the settlement of a lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

“The Health Sciences Center and the CU system is the farthest away from what the peers receive,” said CU president Hank Brown, noting that CU faced discriminatory cuts in 2002 and 2003. “Our disappointment is that this whole thing is delayed for another year.”

But other college presidents say CU may be down, but they are too. Plus CU draws in millions of research dollars, as well as millions of dollars in out-of-state tuition revenue. Roughly 21 percent of CU’s students are from outside Colorado.

This out-of-state student advantage is something the community college system, and even the Metropolitan State College of Denver, doesn’t get, said Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, which performed the peer review study.

“They (community colleges) are not going to get a bunch of Californians coming to community college here,” he said.

CU leaders unhappy

The one-size-fits-all funding approach this year doesn’t make CU leaders happy. Brown said it rewarded schools declining in enrollment and punished those trying to grow.

“I don’t come to that position because I’m at CU,” he said. “To penalize people who have rising enrollment and reward people who have falling enrollment doesn’t match what the state is trying to do.”

College presidents say they are likely to push lawmakers this session to allow them to raise tuition costs to begin to make up the gap between them and their peer institutions.

Hoping to boost tuition

At Metro State, for example, president Steve Jordan said that no matter how much the legislature allocates to higher education, his school will never catch up without a tuition increase.

Tuition at Metro State is, at $1,500 a semester for in-state students, about half the cost of what peers charge at other city colleges.